‘From Scratch’ Is Based on a True Story
A sweeping fairytale about love and loss, Netflix’s From Scratch is the latest limited series to take the streaming platform by storm. Starring Zoe Saldaña, the series follows Amahle “Amy” Wheeler, a woman who puts her law school career on pause to move to Italy and study art.
Amy doesn’t expect to be swept away in a global romance with a Sicilian chef named Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea). Interestingly enough, the series is also based on a true story.
Netflix’s ‘From Scratch’ is a tear-jerker
Though From Scratch opens like a whirlwind romance, fans of the limited series realize that it is much more than that. Instead, the series is about the strength of love and family.
Writer/Executive producer Tembi Locke explained that the series flows linearly to allow the audience to experience things as the characters did, which invokes even more emotion.
“We knew we needed to tell it in a linear fashion, not mosaic,” she told Shadow and Act. “That was one of the first decisions we made because we felt that if we were going to ask the audience to go into deep grief, to go into hard places, we didn’t want them to get lost in time and space by switching up.”
‘From Scratch’ is based on a true story
Fans of From Scratch will be stunned to know that Amy’s story is actually based on author Tembi Locke’s real-life love story, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home. In the book Locke recalls the author’s whirlwind romance, meeting and falling in love with her late husband, Rosario “Saro” Gullo, and eventually losing him to cancer.
“About 20% of it is hardcore fact,” showrunner Attica Locke told Tudum. “Some places in our series — down to where things are placed on the set and where people are standing — are exact mirror images of what actually happened.”
Zoe Saldaña has a personal connection to the limited series
Though Saldaña has never lost a spouse to cancer, the actor did lose her father at age 9 in a car crash. It shifted her perspective on how she dealt with grief and allowed her to delve into the character of Amy.
“Zoe and I had lots of talks about things, so I felt very confident,” Tembi Locke told Shadow and Act. “By the time we would get on set, I was like, ‘Okay, this scene is in good hands.’ There were times when it was too much. It was a lot to relive. Some scenes are literally frame-by-frame recreations of things that happened. There’s a delicate balance, but I also had Attica there to say, ‘You don’t need to be here today. Go home.’”
Moreover, Saldaña’s husband, artist Marco Perego is Italian, so it was helpful that she already knew how to speak Italian.
